LIFE SPANS OF BLACKS FALL AGAIN

Life expectancy for black people in the U.S. has dropped substantially for the fourth year in a row, federal health experts said Wednesday.

The drop was sharper than the one in the previous year and it was large enough that it helped reduce the overall life expectancy for Americans, the National Center for Health Statistics said.

Dr. Harry Rosenberg, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the federal center, said the growing gap in the life expectancy of black people and white people is ''serious and discouraging.''

In the latest statistics, blacks` life expectancy fell to 69.2 years in 1988 from 69.4 years in 1987. Life expectancy for whites in 1988 was 75.6 years, unchanged from the previous year.

Because of the decline in the black rate, overall life expectancy dropped from 75 years in 1987 to 74.9 years in 1988.

For black men, life expectancy dropped from 65.2 years to 64.9 from 1987 to 1988; for black women, the expectancy dropped from 73.6 years to 73.4. For white men, life expectancy rose from 72.2 in 1987 to 72.3 in 1988; for white women, the numbers were the same, 78.9, in both years.

Life expectancy statistics are considered a good measure of overall health because they are based on a complete analysis of the approximately two million death certificates filed each year in the United States.

One important factor in life expectancy is the number of babies who die in their first year. Improvements in these infant mortality figures reported Wednesday also continued to slow, the government said, improving only 1 percent between 1987 and 1988, compared with improvements of more than 5 percent a year in the late 1970s.

The rate was 10 infant deaths per 1,000 live births in 1988, down from 10.1 per 1,000 the previous year.

The United States ranks 22nd in the world in infant mortality, and its ranking has been getting worse since the 1950s.

Behind the discouraging picture, health experts said, was a complex of issues that had a major factor in common: they were preventable, either by more cautious behavior or by better access to health care.

The percentage of babies who were born to women getting no care increased from 8.8 percent in 1980 to 11 percent in 1988 among blacks, and from 4.3 percent to 5 percent among whites.